[Mac OS X TeX] Some clarification

[Richard Koch]

<x-flowed>This is a reply to Adrian Heathcote:

I do not know why Gerben's release of teTeX of 11/1/2001 failed
for you. I recommend installing it again; I've used it on
several machines without trouble.

Here is an explanation of the other problems you mention:

Protcode.tex has a line which checks the version of pdftex being used.
The line is supposed to say "if any version after 14g is being used, make
such and such a change."  Unfortunately, the line was written incorrectly
and actually said  "If any version after 14 has revision version later
than g, make such and such a change."

Until recently, teTeX contained pdftex 14h (actually .14h) so this line 
worked
correctly. That is why margin kerning worked for you.

Very recently, a new version of pdftex was introduced, version 100a
(actually 1.00a).  The old protcode.tex failed for this new version
because of the incorrectly written line. Ross Moore had installed
the new version of pdftex, and that is why margin kerning failed for him.

Shortly after the mistake in protcode.tex was noticed by Moore,
he and others pointed out that it also unnecessarily called abbr.tex.
At that point, Gerben Wierda introduced a new teTeX containing
the latest version of pdftex. Gerben also tried to clean up
protcode.tex, fixing the incorrect line and removing the reference
to abbr. But Gremlins interferred, and the fix wasn't quite correct.

At that point, you installed teTeX and got the latest pdftex, but with
margin kerning broken by the old protcode.tex.

In the Nov 1 version of teTeX, protcode.tex is fixed. Thus you get
the latest pdftex and a working version of margin kerning.

However, if your old version of protcode.tex is still in 
~/Library/texmf/tex/plain/misc,
then it will be used instead of the new file and margin kerning will
fail. Throw it away because protcode.tex is now in teTeX.

Finally I want to apologize to Gerben Wierda. I asked him to add
protcode.tex and abbr.tex to his distribution without reading these
files carefully and noticing the problems.

Dick Koch
koch at math.uoregon.edu


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